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Posts Tagged ‘Atari ST’

American readers might remember this game as Death Sword. But they would also remember Cricket as Baseball so hey.

You modern people with your fancy book learnin’s might be accustomed to having fighting games with multiple characters, but back in the day we just had the same character fight itself with a slightly different colour scheme and we were happy with it, by golly.

At any rate, Barbarian was a cracker of a game, especially when you pull off the move where you swung around and chopped the other bloke’s head off. Could it have been the first fatality in a fighter? Hmm. Gonna stare out the window for a few hours and think about that one.

I really liked this era of fighting games, with a maximum of 16 moves available since you only had one 8-way joystick and one fire button to control the game with. It made the action slower and more tactical since each move had a counter-move.

The C64 version was the one I spent most hours on, but I have to give special credit to the Amiga version for being one of the few games that made the transition from 8 to 16 bit without somehow sucking in the process. The sound in particular was so cool, using lots of samples to simulate the clanging of swords. Until today I had no idea this game was converted to the Electron…I think it’s safe to say it’ll be the only Electron game on this site.

Here are some other comics you might like!

Oh man, the cloth maps they used to bundle with Ultima games were awesome, but you had to be careful with them.

I played Ultima V an awful lot back in the day. The game just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger the more I played it, and the idea of playing a small part in an independently functioning world was tremendously appealing. The conversation system was also fantastic and I spent most of my time just walking up to random NPCs just typing in whatever words I could think of in order to get different responses. It was also super cool how if they asked you for your name and you gave them a fake name they acted like they didn’t believe you.

Here are some other comics you might like!

This is a hard game to write about, because I only really remember a couple of things about this game:

It ended up getting converted to, like, everything.

We had Turrican while everyone in America and Japan had Metroid

It was really freakishly hard

THAT GIANT FIST AT THE END OF THE FIRST LEVEL HOLY GOD HOW DID THEY DO THAT ON THE COMMODORE 64 WOW

As a tech demo it was hard to beat…and the actual game was hard to beat, too. Touching an enemy drained your health really quickly and you didn’t bounce away from dangerous things so it was all too easy to die after a fast moving enemy walks through you.

I remember checking out the Amiga and Mega Drive versions but the stuff that looked hardware-melting on the C64 was commonplace on those machines, and without that tech lure it was just another crazy hard platformer.

New Zealand Story is almost exactly like how I imagine every game should be. It’s not quite Rainbow Islands, but it’s bloody close and so you should really make time to play it at some point.

The section where you get eaten by a whale (here portrayed by Peter Jackson for some reason I thought was funny back when I wrote it) blew my feeble little mind back in the day, and it’s a great example of how games with imaginative sequences will always stand the test of time. (They’re also the ones that are easier to make comics about…)

Tiki’s shoes looked awesome, too.

I always wanted to play the PC Engine version. In fact I always wanted a PC Engine. What a cute little console it was! What an awesome little name it had! Shame it never came out here. I made do with the Master System version which was, like most Master System arcade conversions, way better than it should be.

Here are some other comics you might like!

I really liked this game a lot when it came out in the arcades. It was during the late ’80s period where all sorts of random things were appearing in the arcade market because 2D games were dying and pretty much any silly idea could have a coin box slapped onto it. This was the era of A.P.B., Paperboy and Klax.

These days if Toobin’ was to be brought back the two guys would be buffed up testosterone dudes who should mutant nazi crocodiles with space grenades made from dolphin teeth. And they would swear and have sex with aliens for no apparent reason.

Still though, a bit of en environmental message wouldn’t go astray. They just threw a ton of Coke cans down that river.

I even ended up making a clone of this game with the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit, but it wasn’t especially good. Still it was a good way to spend a couple of days. I wonder if I still have the original somewhere…